Phoenix Program

The articles about CIA officer Simmons and Navy SEAL Kerrey contrasted the stated purpose of the Phoenix program, which was to protect the people from terrorism, with its operational reality—the pacification of the South Vietnamese population through terrorism, through the same tactics employed by the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen in the Second World War.

Remember Bob Kerry, former Governor of Nebraska, 1983-1987, then former senator of Nebraska, 1989-2001? Wikipedia states that he “served in the Vietnam War as a United States Navy SEAL officer and was awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism in combat. During the action for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor, he was severely wounded, precluding further naval service.”

My second article, “Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, and the Need for a War Crimes Trial,” appeared in May 2001. The piece followed revelations that former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey, as a member of a Navy SEAL team on a Phoenix mission in South Vietnam in 1969, participated in the killing of a dozen women and children in Thanh Phong village. Kerrey claimed the civilians were caught in a crossfire, but their bodies were found grouped together as if they had been rounded up and executed.

Wow, when I read these conflicting accounts on what took place in Thanh Phong, you begin to see how the elites in this country will phrase any lie to protect those who are blackmailing them. They will use the pettiest bickering. I mean they’re not men with pride or dignity. Check out this Wikipedia entry on Kerry:

Kerrey’s SEAL team first encountered a villager’s house. Later, according to Kerrey, the team was shot at from the village and returned fire, only to find after the battle that some of the deceased appeared to be under 18, clustered together in the center of the village. “The thing that I will remember until the day I die is walking in and finding, I don’t know, 14 or so, I don’t even know what the number was, women and children who were dead”, Kerrey said in 1998. “I was expecting to find Vietcong soldiers with weapons, dead. Instead, I found women and children.”[11]

In contrast, Gerhard Klann, a member of Kerrey’s SEAL team, gave a different version independently supported by a separate interview with Vietnamese woman Pham Tri Lanh. According to Klann, the team rounded up the women and children from hooches (shelters) and decided to “kill them and get out of there”, for fear that they would alert enemy soldiers. Kerrey responded to Klann’s account by stating “it’s not my memory of it”, and accused Klann of being jealous that Kerrey had not assisted him in obtaining a Medal of Honor for a later mission. Other members of Kerrey’s SEAL team also “wholeheartedly” denied Klann’s account